Towards Knowledge-Based Spatial Planning

Abstract

For millennia, spatial planning has been based on human knowledge about the context and its environment together with some objectives of development. Now, with artificial intelligence and especially knowledge engineering, practices of spatial planning can be renovated. Presently, novel practices can be designed. In addition to human collective knowledge, some new chunks of knowledge can be introduced, coming from physical laws, administrative regulations, standards, data mining, and best practices. By big data analytics, some regularities and patterns can be discovered, which again will lead to new actions towards cities: in other words, there is a virtuous circle linking smart territories and big data that can be the basis for novel spatial planning. The role of this chapter will be to analyze those new chunks of knowledge and to explain how human knowledge, possibly coming from different stakeholders, can be harmonized with machine-processable knowledge as to be the basis for territorial intelligence.